Recently my associates and I have been seeing something in our Google Analytics reports we now know to call referrer spam. This post very neatly documents all the particulars of this latest ploy. In the article the author recommends not visiting the oddball referring sites, which is a rather irresistible thing to do as a web analyst. It is our very nature to visit new referring sites to see how our content is being referred to, etc. Bad news is, the way the perps are going about this, you won’t ever find any links to your site on these referring sites. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before there is a clever response from the web analytics community or from the analytics providers themselves. Time for another game of cat and mouse, unfortunately; and, a good reason to frequently review your web analytics reporting!

Update: more information is available at this post, and includes other links you may find in your reports. I am not mentioning specific domains because they are listed in the posts I’m linking to, and I don’t want to give them any more attention since the attention they’ve earned was ill-gotten to begin with.

It seems that forever one of the advantages paid web analytics tools had over Google Analytics was path analysis. Not anymore – for a few months now GA has had something called Visitors Flow and it is pretty cool. This “new” feature allows you to segment on the fly and visually view a chart of the different ways site visitors traverse your website. For me the best part is that the visitor flow feature works retroactively with your data, unlike some setup and configuration which works going forward from the time it was set up. More posts to come about this really nice feature addition – the pressure continues on paid web analytics vendors!

Nice post title, right? Excellent Analytics is something we all strive for, but this time the topic is actually the name of a plugin / add-in for Google Analytics which allows you to pull Google Analytics data directly into an Excel spreadsheet for further processing.

Excellent Analytics is free and open source, and has been around for a couple years now, so there’s no reason not to try it except for the fact that it relies on Windows and the Microsoft .NET framework. Click the link above to get the plugin, view the FAQ and a little gallery of sample results.

On the same topic of pulling GA data into other tools, this blog post explains how PBS has automated some of its web analytics reporting with other paid tools such as DataGrabber ($299 street).